SEOMoz gives some terrible advice about SEO and user focused development. Rand presents some graphs about different optimization components and how their effect on ranking has evolved over time and magically draws the conclusion that SEO should focus on engines, not users because additional SEO tactics are required to rank.

I am not going to comment here on how he ranks the impact of each tactic. I disagree with some of his analysis, particularly the importance of keyword research and keyword mapping but I agree with others. The larger point here is that Rand is arguing against “focusing on users”, saying this approach is bad SEO advice because it does not include other SEO tactics.

Rand is ignoring the considerable nuance in the meaning of “designing for users”. The art and science of designing websites for users has evolved significantly in the thirteen year thanks to the contributions of Jakob Nielsen, Gord Hotchkiss and tens of thousands of designers, conversion optimizers and site owners who have observed user behavior, tested and validated different theories to enrich the body of knowledge about user interactions with the web in general and search users in particular.

The overall consensus from this research is that the tactics embraced by push oriented designers and agencies who claim to be designing for user are not effective. Flash based sites, fancy formatting and dominant images are almost as much of an obstacle for users as they are for engines. What works for users and for search engines is delivering clear information scent that matches the search intent, bulleted content and the judicious use of bold text. Scent should be presented in easy to read text with high contrast and the content should be written with the assumption that the user wants to scan the page in 3-5 seconds to make sure they are in the correct place. If the scent is not delivered in that time frame, the user will hit the back button and “bounce” from the site. Users will rarely engage with the site navigation if the landing page doesn’t match the search intent.

During the last 12 years, SEO has evolved from the process of manipulating search engines by jamming pages full of hidden keywords to a high ROI discipline with a data driven methodology rooted in query frequency that focuses on developing a site which matches the search intent of users with content that meets that intent. I call this evolved SEO Website Optimization. The effective optimizer focuses on creating pages that attracts visitors and reduces bounce rate, engages users and creating conversions.

A majority of the changes over the last five years with regards to how the engines regard on-page and on-site factors are rooted in the engines trying to emulate human users as they crawl and interpret the page.

• Content in the golden triangle is more important than content in other locations on the page. The impact of keyword stuffed H1 tags has diminished over time but designing your site to deliver good information scent in your headline is more important than ever for both SEO and for conversion.
• Engines readily admit that the location of a link on the page matters. Links in the variable content area on the page, particularly links in the golden triangle, count more than links in the boilerplate, the left/right rail or the footer. The savvy optimizer includes the most important links as citation links above the fold in the variable content area of the site, where users are likely to see them
• Toolbar data, analytics data, conversion optimizer data and other streams give the engines an incredible assortment of information about how the user interacts with a site and we are seeing this data affect rankings more and more.

While the engines are tight lipped about how they use this data, Matt Cutts revealed at SES San Jose this year that Sitelinks are driven, at least in part, by the popularity of individual pages on the site. During a site clinic review of Meijer.com he observed that their Store Locator is buried in their primary navigation (and suggested they make it more prominent) but that is was a popular page “because it appears in your sitelink”. The Meijer Store locator page is also the second listing below the sitelink despite being buried in the global navigation and completely lacking content on the page. User behavior data explains how a boilerplate ONLY page with a few graphics is the second highest ranked page on the site.

I will not take issue with Rands observation that SEO involves a lot of tactics that are specifically for the engines nor do I embrace the Google party line that says “make content for users, not for engines”. SEO is a multi-faceted discipline and I completely concur that these factors cannot be ignored. On the other hand, any SEO who does not focus on designing sites for users is doing a huge disservice to themselves and their clients.

Conversion takes place at the intersection of search intent, content and user experience. More and more, on-site SEO occurs at the same intersection.

Updated: Rand posted an update on his site as well as a comment here reflecting that he was misunderstood. He was trying to say that it is a mistake to ignore SEO for the engines and ONLY focus on users. It is impossible to argue with that. Given that, I have toned down my remarks some and I hope we can agree that user centric design is essential for SEO…it just isn’t enough.

For years Google has successfully hid behind the “don’t be evil” mission statement and aggressively blurred the distinction between SEO and spam, fraud and other illegal activities while ignoring the fact that Adsense is the single largest source of revenue for spam and that Adwords makes millions of dollars each year from ads for fraudulent products or services. Spam is bad and hackers are a problem, but the primary vector for many criminal activities are the ad networks themselves, not professional SEOs.

Its time we stop complaining and actually start doing something about it. The ROIguy is pleased to announce a new idea we are calling “White Knight SEO”, which aims to protect users from these scams by dominating organic search results with consumer protection information. We hope that we can place advisory content to take over the top 10 results in Google for searches related to common scams and online fraud with a particular focus on areas which are using adwords & adsense to snare victims.

The first target is “Google Cash” and related terms. If you are interested in writing about this topic (or any other type of spam/fraud that is being perpetrated through Adwords), we invite you to join our crusade and protect consumers from fraudulent offers around “Google Cash Detective Review – Scam Alert”. In turn, we will do our best to publicize the articles and hopefully earn some links to help them rank.

Update, August 19. David Rodnitsky of PPC Associates is the first official White Knight (even if he isn’t an SEO) with his Google Cash Review.

Update, August 21st, 2009. Jonathan Hochman offers his take on Google Scams

Update, September 3rd, 2009. Jonah Stein weighs in with Slaughter Google’s Cash Cow

A couple of weeks ago we decided to launch a little experiment with Hyper Local blogging for a dear family friend who is a real estate agent in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Like any website launch, the first thing we did was going looking for a domain. It turns out that AdamsMorganRealEstate.com was parked and for sale for a reasonable figure (after some negotiation). Since the goal of this site was to talk about Adams Morgan in general and very specifically about real estate in Adams Morgan, the domain was a no brainer.

After about a week of content development, design reviews and agreement, content updates and further refinements, the site was ready to go live. We launched with little fanfare and barely more link development: A quick post from this blog and a few others from some friendly sources with very little effort to actually get the blog to rank, we just wanted to get crawled and let the serious link building efforts commence.

The site is built in WordPress using Chris Pearson’s awesome WordPress Theme Thesis, so we didn’t worry too much about the mechanics. During the initial build out, we had taken time to setup Google Analytics, create a new gmail account for the site owner and configure all the right plugins (Akismet and Socialable). The one thing we didn’t get around to doing was to register with Google Webmaster Tools. After about a week, the site still hadn’t been crawled, so I spent a few seconds to register it with Webmaster Central.

The lesson here is pretty simple. If you buy a domain on the aftermarket, be sure to create a site and register it with Google Webmaster Tools BEFORE you start any serious development of the site. You can then get a heads up to make sure the domain is clean and/or start the scrubbing process immediately. More importantly, if you are buying an expensive domain or one for which part of the value is the existing backlink profile, you might want to stipulate that the domain is clean and has not been penalized and you might even consider demanding a “test” to find out if there are any problems.

Imagine my surprise to see a message that said my brand new site appeared to violate Google TOS.

In retrospect, the warning sign on this domain were pretty clear; although the domain had about a dozen pages of “content”, none of the pages showed up for the site: query.